Donald Clark Plan B

What is Plan B? Not Plan A!

Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Martha Lane Fox's Dimbleby idea: DOT.EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE A PONY....

Martha Lane Fox’s Dimbleby lecture was an opportunity lost.
Rather than present a vision of the future it simply reinforces the past. When the recommendations focus on an institution, national
regulation and gender, you know that it’s an all-too-British view of the
digital world.

Oh no – an ‘institution’

Her key idea, the only concrete recommendation, is an
‘Institution’. When in doubt – the Brits always recommend an institution. This is the British way.
I’ve asked a number of internet entrepreneurs what they thought of this and the
replies were scathing. Steve Rayson was typical “The US does not dominate the
internet because they set up an institution. I just spent the last week on the
West Coast and things are accelerating at a pace. There is huge energy,
investment, risk taking and urgency. The UK will fall behind because it moves
too slow.”

I emailed my local Digital Catapult (latest of many institutions in the Digital field) in Brighton, five days
ago – still no reply! We spawn institutes and quangos like slurry on fields –
most fail. The budget gets gobbled up by head-hunters hiring expensive staff,
many of whom come from other similar organisations that have failed. Then
there’s the expensive building, usually in the most expensive city in the UK –
London. Then the expensive, London-based staff with researchers galore. The CEO
is often a civil servant and the chair one of the great and the good, with a
board of buffers who finger-peck away at their tablets in meetings, thinking
that this is what it feels like to be in ‘tech’. New website, new IT,
usually some awful membership offer and plenty of networking events with
canapés.

The problem with institutions is that they start to serve not
the cause they were set up to tackle but themselves. As they have high overheads so after the initial funding
runs out they need income, and as the
membership model has had its back broken by that huge free institution, the
internet, they struggle. That’s when survival becomes their goal and people lose
interest. If you want a perfect example, look at the Institute for Learning.

Regulation

She’s all wrong on this. This is NOT about UK national
regulation – that’s cornershop thinking. The internet is borderless, so
international regulation is the real battleground. No mention of the big issues
from Martha. No mention of the most important concept - net neutrality. The problem with localised, national regulation, is the
pettiness and, to be frank, ignorance, of politicians. I’m glad Martha’s in the
House of Lords, but I’m not sure that she’s even in my top 100 people when it
comes to really contributing and knowing about the regulatory issues. That
aside, because the House of Lords brims with lackeys and political appointees,
with an average age well over 70, they are far removed from being able to even
grasp the issues, never mind tackle the issue of regulation. So we end up with
impractical filters and laws that do nothing to really tackle the issues at
hand. On the whole they see the web through a pathological lens, as an
uncivilised pit of vipers, corrupting the young. On a national level it is
avoiding awful regulation that is the task at hand – not the introduction of Middle
England and Victorian values into laws that simply don’t work.

Gender

Women in IT is an issue but gender politics is not, in my
view, the key to success. It’s sometimes difficult to even express this view as people confuse the political with the practical. No one would argue that more women should be involved in the digital world but to what problem is this the solution? The technology, open internet and international
regulation are the great equalisers. Let equality of opportunity bloom but don't confuse this with getting on with the job of getting things done.

Establishment

When Martha was given the title UK Digital Champion, the Inclusion Tzar, so removed was she in terms of background and experience
that the joke was that her idea of equality and participation was to ‘give
everyone a pony’. It sounded good, but the Soho-based organisation was filled
by her posh mates and little was really achieved. She’s as ‘establishment’ as you get and the solution to raising
access and participation was never another privately-educated, Oxford type. Interestingly as the talk
unfolded one question kept coming back to me – she failed to solve this
problem, despite the considerable funding last time round, so what makes us
think she has the solutions now? It was all a bit lastminute.com – lots of tired
old destinations and ideas, aggregated together in a talk. There was nothing
new. As for the strapline ‘to be brilliant at the
internet’ it's meaningless and awful.

Conclusion

My disappointment was confirmed when I tried the
website- it was down for most of
yesterday. It’s up today but is nothing more than a transcript of her talk.
When I really looked for new ideas I found nothing. Even worse, I found a lot
of vague and weak nonsense. Here’s a typical sentence “In this 800th year anniversary of Magna Carta, why don’t we
establish frameworks to help navigate the online world?” What the hell does
this even mean?

Saturday, March 28, 2015

The fake 'Wellness' cult in education & the workplace

As a Board
member of an organisation, with over 100 employees, I was shocked to discover
that we’ve embarked on a ‘Wellness’ survey. This comes on the back of a wave of
‘Mindfulness’ courses I’ve witnessed in organisations and education, and before
that the obsession with ‘Happiness’. I’m suspicious of these anodyne ‘…ness’
words. For me it’s a morass of unsubstantiated therapeutic theory, fuzzy terms and
feeble thinking. But there’s a more worrying side to all this….

Wellness
in children
In
Scotland, this has taken a rather spooky turn. The Nationalist government,
fuelled by electoral success, has sneaked in a policy that is not far short of
a Stasi 2.0 approach to childcare. Every child is to have a ‘state guardian’
who is NOT the parent. Children automatically become wards of the state under
the watch of an army of named persons (state employees). The idiotic mnemonics
already employed include; SHANARRI (Safe, Healthy, Achieving, Nurtured, Active,
Respected, Responsible, Included) and GIRFEC “Getting It Right For Every
Child”. This
results in this
type of horror story, one of wellness gone bad.

Wellness
in education
A large
number of US Universities have taken to Wellness contracts. The University of
Massachusetts, along with many others, has a Campus Wellness Contract. Undergraduates are
asked to sign a contract that commits them to a healthy lifestyle (roughly
conforming to white, Christian values). The last thing many need at that age of
joy, curiosity and exploration, is some contract that turns you into a dull,
conformist. Is that the real goal of education, to be ‘well’, as defined by
some dull, abstentious benchmark?

Workplace
wellness
Workplace
‘wellness’ programmes abound, largely surveys and weak documents no sooner read
than forgotten. Since when did HR think they have the right to take over the
role therapists and responsibility for the emotional welfare of employees? HR,
rather than sticking to their worthy role of development, pay and rations, has
always wanted to be taken more seriously. This just opens them up to ridicule.
What gave them the right to take control of our emotional lives? Why do they
think they are qualified to become therapeutic and moral experts? In practice,
this means reading one or two self-help books or a short course run by people
who themselves cobble together some evidence-empty, PowerPoint and downloaded a
survey template. It’s all so superficial and hollow.

How did
this happen?This debate
goes back to the Greeks and reached its peak with Bentham, Mill and subsequent
philosophical and political debate around `Utilitarianism’ in the late 19th C. ‘The Greatest Happiness
Principle’ led to a definition of happiness in terms of pleasure and the
absence of pain. However, Bentham’s ‘hedonic calculus’ proved too awkward to
use in any practical sense. Mill opted for quality, not quantity, with a focus
on higher pleasures, but there were still problems of definition, and
measurability. The arguments that ‘happiness’ is vague, difficult to measure
and cannot be used as a guide for moral or social well-being, remain a problem
for positive psychology.

The great
Barbara Ehrenreich, in Smile or Die, (detailed review here) is one of many who have
criticised the rise of positive psychology and thinking. She thinks the ‘happy’
and ‘wellness’ movement replaces reality with positive illusions, and I agree.
You can think positively but “at the cost of less realism”. Seligman’s
book Authentic Happiness was been seen by as Ehrenreich as a “jumble of
anecdotes”. She found his formula for happiness banal: H= S+F+C
(Happiness = set range, circumstances and voluntary control). In the Journal of
Happiness Studies she reads study after study linking happiness to every
conceivable outcome but it’s a lop-sided view of the world, with no room for
the realism of negative results.

The
Wellness Syndrone

The
Wellness Syndrome by Carl Cederstrom and Andre Spicer, is another welcome
antidote to this wave of woolliness. The authors rightly expose it as a faddish
syndrome, really a moral obligation and imperative to regulate your feelings
and behaviour. The happy/unhappy dualism slips into the good/bad moral
imperative. What they posit as the real mechanism for this movement is an
appeal to narcissism. It’s a programme actually appeals to the ‘me’ in all of
us.

Their main point is that it is counterproductive. The more you seek wellness, the less
well you become. Constantly worrying about how well you are is no way to live
your life. In this clever but simple
little study two groups watched a happiness inducing video. Those
who had undergone exposure to ‘happiness’ treatment before watching the video
felt worse than those who had not.

Conclusion
In all of
these cases an unwelcome, and I suspect, unintended consequence, of all of
this happiness, mindfulness and wellness effort, is a condescending
attitude towards the rest of us who ‘don’t get it’ or ‘don’t live up to these
standards’. There is a smugness about the whole affair, a stink of
righteousness. It’s the modern equivalent of a meme-inspired cult, a touch of the Temperence movement and smattering of Scientology.

Thursday, March 26, 2015

10 reasons why ‘Hands up…’ teaching kills learning….

A teacher on Twitter today bemoaned the fact
that his students don’t ask questions. I’ve also heard academics complain about
the lack of critical thinking and inquiry among their students. What was absent
in both instances is a lack of critical reflection on the problem. This is a
teacher, not a learner problem. I’ve witnessed it in classroom observations and
ask any pupil when they last experienced this behaviour and you’ll get all the
evidence you need, as an old hand-me-down practice, it is still a deeply embedded behaviour in teaching. Here’s
some reasons for getting rid of this practice:

Hands up

Hands up anyone who knows…..

1. The people who put their hands up usually know the
answer. Asking these learners to provide an answer does nothing to improve
their learning – they know it already.

2. On the other hand - this technique destroys the confidence and self-esteem of
those who are not sure or don’t know the answer.

3. It excludes those who are introverts as it’s an
invitation for extrovert behaviour.

4. Teachers allow far too little time for learners to think
about the answer and choose someone tooquickly, demoralising those who are
giving it some thought.

5. Note that most questions asked by teachers are not
designed to make people really think. They are all too often quick fire questions
that focus on atomic facts or names. Try this question:

A bat and ball cost £1.10.

The bat costs one pound more than the ball.

How much does the ball cost? (Answer at bottom)

This is a good question, as it really is a test of
mathematical thinking but it needs time to think through before you answer.
These are the questions you should not be shooting out at the whole class.

6. It can expose learners to ridicule, if the answer is way
off-piste and encourages peer-pressure in the sense of exposing learners to
ridicule from their class colleagues.

7. Worse of all, it conditions learners to see the learning
process as one of providing correct answers to questions. It does NOT encourage
students to ASK the questions or engage in critical thinking themselves.

8. If the practice of ‘Hands up…’ is thought by teachers to
command attention. It actually instils in learners the fear of being exposed,
that’s why most keep their heads down and don’t put their hands up.

9. Another excuse is that allows the teacher to do whoe class assessment, to know who kows and who doesn't know. First it doesn;t do this at all, many with their hands down are simply scared to answer. And if this is the reason, as we've seen above, it does more harm than good.

10. This is not active, collaborative or constructivist
learning. It’s an insidious way to reinforce didactic teaching and get
learners, not to think for themselves, but to fear authority.

Conclusion

Research from ‘The Practice of Questioning’ by James Dillon,
showed that in both primary and secondary schools, children were rarely asked
to come up with their own questions. One study, astonishingly, found that
pupils asked only 2 questions to the teacher’s 84. Over a year, pupils were asking
questions, on average, just one a month. It’s an easy ‘script’ for teachers to
fall back on. But it’s illusory participation that inhibits rather than
enhances learning. Teachers need to be giving a helping hand not asking for hand signals. Getting them to ask the questions wins - hands down. It’s a clear example of why seeing teaching as a practice is
flawed, as that simply begs the question of what practice.

Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Finland’s greatest export isn’t education; it’s Angry Birds!

Lots of
talk about serious games and games in learning. Some simply add ‘scores’ or
‘lives’ to their e-learning and call it gamification. But much of it is from
people with limited knowledge of the games industry producing educational apps
by the dozen, most of which are never used. This is a look at one of the
world’s most successful games to see what magic dust we can glean from games in
learning. My choice for a game that teaches us real lessons in learning is
Angry Birds, and although I’m critical of putting Finland on a pedestal ineducation, this is arguably Finland’s greatest ever export.

So what
exactly made it more popular than Mickey Mouse?

1. Flying start

You can
learn to pay the game in seconds. All you need is your finger to operate the
catapult – it’s that easy. That’s something most teachers and educators can
learn from; no long sign-in process, none of those boring learning objectivesat the start or long dull introductions on the history of the subject. Jump right in, grab them by the throat and get the party started.

2. Play is easy

Then
playing is easy. As games designers and players often say – it’s all in the
‘gameplay’. It’s addictive, has dozens and dozens of levels, is unbelievably
simple to use yet has complexity under the hood that makes it different as you
progress. This ‘ease of use’ did not come easily. It took a team of highly
specialized experts, lots of user feedback and rigour in design. One of the
problems with learning content is that the teams are weak, user feedback rarely
sought and the user interface woefully inadequate.

3. Long or short bursts

Learning is
too often delivered in overlong, sometimes marathon sessions – lectures, hours
of e-learning, semester long MOOCs. Angry Birds can be played for less than a a
minute, a few minutes, ten minutes, an hour or longer. It’s up to you. In
learning we need to take advantage of those breaks and irregular slots for
learning – on the train, on the plane, in the car, waiting, when we’re bored.
Learning needs to be both short and long-form.

4. Constructive failure

By far the
most interesting feature of games, in terms of learning (something that is
often absent or shunned in learning practice) is ‘failure’. Most games have
catastrophic failure (you die) but this is the precisely the key driver. You
respawn or start again on that same level. You’re not allowed to move on too
quickly, which is all too common in learning and leads to permanent and
catastrophic failure in learners, especially in subjects like maths, where
knowing one thing is a necessary condition for knowing another. Constructive,
not destructive, recoverable failure should be built into all learning
experiences

5. Repeats within levels

Games
designers have been applying the Zone of Proximal Development with more rigour and
regularity than most learning professionals for decades, and they’ve never
heard of Vygotsky. They know that levels have to both ‘be’ and ‘feel’
achievable. As soon as game players feel that they are being ‘punished’, the
game is up. They must know that failure can be overcome. You must ‘want’ to try
again. A mark is never final, only a temporary marker on the way to further
success. That’s the difference between marking and game scores. . Marking is
such a destructive force in learning – it acts as an end-point, even for those
that succeed – smart people stop at 80%, those who score badly get demoralized,
fail and stop completely. This is the opposite of what happens in games.

6. User feedback

Rovio had
tons of user feedback taken from behind glass screens, where users voiced what
they liked, didn’t like, found difficult, found easy, excited them, bored them.
How often does teaching. lectures or e-learning get trialed with a clear
process for harvesting the results of that trial through market research? Rarely.
I used to run an e-learning test lab ‘Epicentre’ that tested usability. It is something
that needs budget, a rigorous process that needs real expertise.

7. Smarts under the hood

All the
work is done by the engine, which is largely invisible to the user. There’s a
physics module, that isn’t quite real physics but does all of the ballistic
movements and collision software. Everything is finely calibrated and finessed
to produce a seamless gameplay, largely through smart software. This is the way
online learning is going as AI and adaptive learning come into play.

8. Experienced team

Rovio had
completed 50 odd games before Angry Birds. This wasn’t some creative epiphany.
It was an experienced company with loads of design, technical and games design
expertise. Sure there was the inspirational act of first designing the
characters (they’re irresistibly cute) but it was mostly the sweat, blood and
tears of incrementally producing a game that led to success. There were no
short-cuts. People often forget that good learning content also requires a team
of people – project manager, designer, writer, graphic designer, audio
engineer, developer, tester.

9. Business experience

These guys
didn’t pop up from nowhere. They were in the ‘business’ of games design and had
solid experience in the marketing and selling of those games. They had put in
the time. Far too many apps are being created by far too many ‘get rich quick’
types or ‘grant chasers’. What you need is experience, a good team and
relentless focus, sensitive to users needs.

10. Brands matter

These guys
were calculating with their brand. It wasn’t called ‘Catapult’ but took the
intriguing title ‘Angry Birds” and a ton of marketing expertise went into their
strategy for selling. They hired a professional marketing company, in the UK,
and now don’t see themselves as a games company, preferring the term media or
brand builders. So many courses and learning experiences are poorly branded, if
branded at all.

Conclusion

We have a lot to learn from the games world in
learning but it is often not what we think. Games aren’t always wise in
learning as they can be a distraction from the actual learning, create nothing
more than extra cognitive effort, put people off, be costly or simply end up
being a poor game, poor learning or both. On the other hand, learning needs to
embrace quick starts, ease of use, short/longer use, constructive failure and competence
levels. Learning designers, especially in online learning, have to work with
smarter software, leverage experience, see this as a business and think also in
terms of marketing and brands. That’s what gamification brings to the screen.

Tuesday, March 24, 2015

10 reasons: Why we need to kill boring ‘learning objectives’!

At the end
of this course you will….” zzzzzzzzz……. How to kill learning before it has even
started. Imagine if every movie started with a list of objectives; “in this
film you will watch the process of a ship sail from Southampton, witness the
catastrophic effect of icebergs on shipping, witness death at sea but understand
that romance will be provided to keep you engaged”. Imagine Abraham Lincoln
listing his objectives before delivering the Gettysburg Address. Imagine each
episode of Breaking Bad starting with its objectives. It makes NO sense.1. First thing dull text
When dealing with learners who need to be motivated, excited and hooked, why prescribe a screenful of boring text as your starting point. This makes no sense, especially online, where first impressions really matter.2. Gagne misappliedThere’s always a villain and in this case it’s Gagne. To be fair this wasn;t entirely his fault. ‘Stating the objectives’ was the second in his nine steps of instruction. Unfortunately few remember that the first step was ‘Gaining attention’ THEN ‘Stating objectives’. Most start by stating objectives putting the second step first. In any case, I have serious doubts about including the second step at all. Indeed, this nine-step approach, as I have previously stated, tends to produce formulaic, often uninspiring and over-long courses.

3. Over prescriptive

We know
that people make very quick judgments of other people, often in a matter of
seconds, and if you as a teacher are forced to do this prescriptive, unnatural
act before you get a chance to put yourself across as an expert, practitioner
and teacher, you will have got off to the worst possible start. To force
teachers, trainers and lecturers to state learning objectives at the start of every
session is to be over-prescriptive. It almost suggests a lack of critical thought and learning. You WILL learn this... come what may!

3. Teacher-Speak

Anyone who
knows anything about speaking, writing for TV or film, designing web sites or games
or any form of content that needs to keep an audience engaged, knows that
immediate engagement matters. If those first impressions are a bureaucratic
list of objectives, framed in teacher or training-speak, you’ll have set the
wrong dull tone. It’s a behaviourist approach
at odds with what we know about motivation, engagement and attention.

4. Attention killer

Arousal or
attention is a necessray condition for learning Arouse people at the start and they will remember more. Yet if the
first experience many learners have is a detailed registration procedure
followed by a dull list of learning objectives, attention is more likely to
fall than rise. There is a strong argument for emotional engagement at the
start of the learning experience, not a jargon-like list of objectives, purely on hte basis of attention.

5. Little learning a dangerous thing

Even if
this were a good practice, it is not easy and few have the experience to write objectives
well. They end up being short and imprecise lists full of fuzzy terms such as ‘understand’,
‘know’, ‘learn’,‘be aware of’,
‘appreciate’ and so on. Writing a good objective in terms of actual performance, with the pre-requisite conditions (tools, conditions, presumptions), actual
performance in terms of what the learners will know or be able to do and the measurable criterion such as time and so on, is not easy.

6. Teacing and learning time wasted

How much
time is currently wasted by teachers and designers thinking about writing and
delivering learning objectives. Even worse, how much learners’ time is wasted
reading them. Even worse, how much attention and motivation is lost in learners
by being made to sit through this bureaucratic stuff? My guess, especially if
teachers, lecturers, instructors and trainers do this at the start of every
lesson, lecture or module, that the waste is in the many, many millions.

7. Better to Top and tail

Rather than
state learning objectives, we’d be much better focusing on productive
techniques that focus on improved retention. For example, to ‘top and tail’
lectures, modules etc. so that reinforcement of learning takes place through
spaced-practice. Remind people at the start of what they learned last time and at the end repeat - this form of reinfrcement works.

9. Student signallingOne excuse is that learning objectives allow the student to see what they're in for and provides goals. Yet how many learners, read the objectives and say 'not for me, I'm out of here'? People on courses are there to stay. And if you really want to stage gfoals, state goals but phrase those goals in terms or real goals personal to the learners - the exam, promotion, reputation.

10. Over-prescriptive behaviourism

It is important that teachers come across in a way that they feel comfortable with. Education and training has a habit of using theory, in this case 50-year-old theory, that simply refuses to budge and gets fossilized into prescriptive rules that constrict teaching and learning. The problem with this older theory is that it came when both the theorists and teacher-training world was dominated by behaviourism. It’s time we moved on.

Conclusion

Note that
I’m not criticising the use of learning objectives or learning outcomes, as
defined by Mager, in the design of courses. That’s a skill and practice
that’s far too often absent in learning professionals. My arguments focus on boring
learning objectives made explicit to learners at the start of a course.